1950 - Lancaster – Croquet

Our family had a croquet set for many years. It was kept with the outdoor items, the yard tools, the bikes, the badminton set, and it was moved from house to house, basements to garages, and used only occasionally; usually when other kids were visiting and we needed something more organized to be doing. It was most likely bought when we lived in Lancaster, which would have made it about my age. It consisted of a wooden and wire rack on wheels, with painted wooden balls, chipped from use, and striped wooden mallets suspended with their heads on top. The mallets had been turned on a lathe to create grooves and the stripes were painted the same color as the balls. Whenever we happened on the croquet set, whether by looking for it or by accident, Daniel would pull out the red mallet, point to its head, and smile at me. The head had dark brown spots on it and Daniel didn’t forget that it was his blood. Neither did I, for that matter.

When I was four or five years old, we were playing croquet in our backyard in Lancaster when Daniel’s ball collided with mine. According to the rules, he set his ball touching mine, put his foot on it to hold it in place, and whacked it hard enough to knock mine across the yard. I retaliated by taking my mallet and whacking him on his head, breaking open his scalp and spattering it with blood for the rest of its life. It also marked me as someone with a temper and, for some reason I never understood, this amused Daniel.

I don’t actually remember the event, though I’ve heard the story so many times that I feel like I do. I don’t know if Daniel needed stitches or only a Band-Aid, he survived and I don’t think he had a scar. I do have a visual memory of playing croquet in Lancaster, but I think it came from our home movies. Many of my memories from Lancaster are suspect and could be stories that I illustrated with other memories. My mother used to tell me how I would throw my baby bottles from the crib when they were empty and, when she did, I would picture the crib and the bottles and the bottle sterilizing equipment – these images certainly came from when Phillip or Tommy were infants and not me. My mother would tell me how I fell out of a second story window when I was three and they only discovered it when I came walking in from outside, when they knew I was upstairs. Apparently I was saved by stack of loosely piled lumber that I landed on. I used to think I could remember seeing the lumber and seeing my family sitting around the table as I went in, but that really isn’t very likely. Mother described how she would carefully sneak up on me when I was sitting in an open upstairs window. I do have a memory of sitting in a window and watching Michael and Daniel playing in the yard below me, but I’m sure that’s another case of memory editing.

I left Lancaster shortly after I turned six in 1952, so any memories I have of Lancaster would be from when I was five or younger, and I imagine that most were from when I was five. Some memories I don’t doubt. I remember chasing after Michael and Daniel as we came running down the stairs and out the front door, I held out my hand to stop the storm door from closing on me and my hand went straight through the glass, shattering it. I suffered no cuts or scratches, and after recovering from the scare and being checked out by Mother, it was declared a minor miracle and I thought it was cool. Someone, probably Daniel since he was the source of most information for me, told me about arteries and how close I may have been to dying. With that, and the story of falling out the window, I felt for a while like I was protected, and I was taught about guardian angels. I don’t know how many years that feeling lasted; I don’t feel that way now and don’t know when it stopped.

One memory that is certain is from a summer day when Daniel and I were walking through a field a little way up from our house. Our parents were one of the first to build a house on Roseville Road, so many empty fields and lots surrounded it. That day we were probably only wearing shorts and I stepped into a nest of bumblebees. They swarmed around me and began climbing my bare legs and body, stinging as they went. Honeybees die when they sting, but bumblebees can sting innumerable times, and they kept stinging. I screamed and looked at Daniel who was yelling at me, probably telling me to get off the nest, and, after however many seconds it took, I started running and kept running. Daniel ran beside me all the way, he too was screaming, though I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I did understand that he was trying to tell me what to do, and he looked as frightened as I felt. The bees were still stinging when I started running, but they probably fell off sometime as I ran all the way down the road, across our yard, and into the dark house where my mother was. My memory ends there; somehow mother knew what to do. Sometimes I still get a clear image of Daniel’s face running beside me, yelling and frowning and scared, and that remains probably my fondest image of him, I knew he was doing everything he could to help me and steer me home to safety, but, mostly, I knew he was just as horrified as I was.

1956 – Swampscott – Black Will’s Cliff

Black Will’s Cliff was a tall ragged mound of solid red granite that stretched for 1200 feet from the northeast end of King’s Beach to the southwest end of Fisherman’s Beach. It may have actually been Blackwell’s Cliff, I never knew for sure, usually referred to it simply as “the rocks”. It was a bluff below the commercial stretch of Hawthorne Street and its top was lined with expensive houses and the Hawthorne-By-The-Sea. At low tide the Atlantic lapped around the huge boulders buried in the sand along its base and, at high tide, it covered these rocks and splashed up the wall of granite and into its crevices and canyons.

We first saw Black Will’s Cliff on the day we arrived in Swampscott. While Mother tried to get us settled into our hotel room, we were looking out the window and demanding to go and see the ocean. We got permission and hurried out of the hotel to stand on King’s Beach and I discovered that Humphrey Street had buttons on the Walk lights to stop traffic for pedestrians and I would have liked one back home on Washtenaw Avenue. King’s beach was fifteen or twenty feet below street level, with an old concrete sea wall curving up from the sand to the sidewalk above. A pipe railing ran along the sidewalk and, where there were gaps, there were concrete steps leading right and left to the beach below.

It was January and the beach was cold and it stank from dead fish, seaweed, and sea life that had washed up on the sand. I hadn’t expected the smell, but above the rotting smell was a cold wind that carried the smell of ocean salt and that was exactly as it should be. I looked out across the waves to the horizon and thought about how it stretched all the way to England. Of course, it didn’t, I was looking towards the southeast, not England, but I wanted to feel how I felt when I looked at it on a map. The ocean looked like I expected, a little scarier since it was winter and it was cold and choppy, but I didn’t feel any closer to England.

A few miles straight out across the water was a large round rock rising above the surface with a much smaller rock on its left and an even smaller one on its left. To me, it always looked like the back of an elephant with the top of its skull and the curve of its trunk breaking the surface. This was Egg Rock and it always seemed to dominate the horizon. I never knew if it was named for its shape or because it was inhabited by seagulls; it was said to be thoroughly covered with bird shit and that seemed likely. There were always swarms of seagulls flying over King’s Beach, calling in their screeching voices, dropping shellfish, dive-bombing, and fighting over dead things on the beach. I never found them appealing, though it seemed most people did. The only time I thought they were graceful was when they would glide with open wings against the sky, the rest of the time they were more obnoxious than Blue Jays. Perhaps they simply made me ill at ease because they weren’t intimidated like birds were supposed to be. If they wanted something, they would hop or fly as close to me as they needed to and never seemed to care.

We were to learn that Fisherman’s Beach was the preferred bathing beach in those days and King’s Beach wasn’t cleaned regularly. That was a plus for us, who were eager to see as many sea creatures as we could, dead of alive. We had all poured over our copies of The Seashore and could identify more items than we were likely to see, but Michael was the authority. He read more and could remember more, and we had learned in the fields back in Ann Arbor that we saw more when we followed his lead. Michael wanted to see some tide pools, so we headed for the rocks. The rocks had patches of snow on them and climbing was a bit hazardous. Daniel slipped and went into the water up to his waist. Michael helped him back on to the rocks and I could see, from where I was perched on a rock, that Daniel was not only slightly mortified but he was scared as well. Both of them looked a little scared and I thought of how cold that water was and how awful it would be to have the waves throw him against the rocks. The ocean wasn’t entirely a friendly thing.

I don’t remember if we saw any tide pools the first day, but there were plenty along Black Will’s Cliff and whenever we visited the rocks we would usually check to see whatever the last high tide had left in them. We had read The Seashore, but on our first visits we had Michael as a tour guide and he was able to identify and remember the names of anything we had forgotten or never seen. It was a little surprising that Michael knew these shore animals better than any of the kids who had lived there all their lives, but I was used to that and, though I knew he was always reading books on nature, I don’t think I realized how much reading he must have actually done. Michael was fourteen then and about to start ninth grade at the high school, so he didn’t always come with us when we went to the rocks just for fun. When we didn’t have anything better to do, we would go climb around the rocks.

The route we took would depend on the tide; we would go as low as the water level allowed. This was mainly because it was easier climbing and more interesting to move along the lower levels where there were more flat sections, more tide pools, and more miniature beaches. But the main reason was that at the top there was only bald rock abutting against private yards and, though we didn’t balk against racing across someone’s yard, we didn’t like to do it. Sometimes property owners would yell at us and try to chase us off the rocks and we found this offensive. We could understand when we were on their property, but the rocks themselves were no-man’s land and nobody could claim them as their own. We didn’t actually know what the law was, but we knew what was right. This presented me with a moral predicament. I found it distasteful how the rich would selfishly blockade stretches of nature and try to keep it for themselves, even when they weren’t using it. The whole coastline was a demonstration of selfishness, with the greedy erecting fences so that others couldn’t even share the view. I knew this wasn’t the view of our country, the law, or most other people; but what really perplexed me was that I could imagine if I ever had a house along the shore, I would probably feel the same way and would want to protect it from others. It made me hope that I never possessed anything that other people coveted, the question of right and wrong became too confusing.

From the top of the rocks there was only one place to get to Humphrey Street without crossing someone’s yard, and that was from an observation stand that had been built for the nuns at St. John’s. There, the nuns could sit in the open under a roof and gaze out over the Atlantic and there was a walk that led back towards the church and school. Apparently a hurricane had passed through Swampscott a few years before and destroyed their old observation stand and this one was recently built.

The terrain changed as you moved around the rocks, it was a miniature coastline in itself with small beaches, chasms, and rock formations. There was one stretch of large boulders that was covered at high tide, but full of tide pools and exposed rocks covered with barnacles and seaweed at low tide. At times, we would have to wait for the waves to retreat before we could dash from one rock to another. At one point along the shore, there was a thin crevice in the wall of rock and above the waves was a rock ledge by a horizontal crack that was about two feet deep. We would stand on that ledge and smoke cigarettes and for a while kept a pack of Parliaments pushed back into the crack. We had given Phillip the thirty-five cents to buy the pack from a cigarette machine in the entranceway to the Hawthorne-by-the-Sea. We chose Phillip because he was young enough that any adult would naturally assume he was buying them for his parents.

Swampscott – Hadley School to Elmwood

I started school while we were still staying in the Willey House. Daniel would be going to St. John’s, the Catholic school, but they had no room in the fourth grade, so I was sent to Hadley Elementary. Beginning school in the middle of the year wasn’t going to be fun at any school, so I don’t think I really cared. St. Frances had been a modern school, but Hadley had been built when they still made schools like prisons. It was a huge brick block of a building that sat behind a chain-link fence. Between the school and the fence there was an asphalt playground where the children milled around at recess. Inside were long dark halls with doors staggered along the walls, oaken doors with a panel of translucent pebbled glass imbedded at the top and a glass transom up above. The classrooms all had a wall of enormous double-hung windows that were so tall they had to use a long window pole to lower the upper sash, but because of the large trees outside, little sunshine ever made it into the room. My memory also shows a cloakroom at the back that was filled with heavy winter coats and dripping boots, but I am not entirely sure that I haven’t modified this image over the years.

I was introduced to the class at the front of the room, but I didn’t have to stand and speak so they could listen to my accent like Daniel had to do. When class was dismissed, one boy came up to me and asked me what my religion was. It seemed like an odd question, but then I had always gone to a Catholic school, and when I told him he seemed pleased and said he was Catholic too. We then discovered that he lived across the street from our house and my friendship with Buddy Leonard began. He and another boy walked with me back to the Willey House, and over the coming days he showed me around our neighborhood.

The most important thing Buddy showed me was the shortcut to get to my house. Hadley school faced Redington Street and behind it was Elmwood Road, the street Buddy and I lived on, but to get to it you had to walk around the large end of the block that ran along Humphrey Street, then Monument Ave. and then turned onto Elmwood. Our house, at 156 Elmwood, was across the street at the far end, and Elmwood was long and curved. The correct way to go was up Redington, past one or two houses, turn into Mr. Green’s driveway and go across his lawn to the big stonewall that divided the block. This wall must have been three feet wide and three feet high and made entirely of large rocks set in concrete and topped with concrete. I thought this wall was incredible, and was sure it was the oldest thing in Swampscott. Once you climbed over the wall, you walked down the side of the Odd Fellow’s Hall and you were on Elmwood. It became the route I took daily on the way to school, or when heading down town. The first time I tried this on my own, I climbed the wall too far to the left and found myself on the top looking into a backyard with a boy my age in it. He told me I wasn’t going to cut through his yard and I was dumbfounded, I was sure there wasn’t a backyard there. The boy was Bobby Frizzell, and though we got off to an antagonistic start and would generally be a little on guard with each other, I don’t think we ever actually had a fight. I did have a fight once with his older brother, Eddie, who was Daniel’s age. But it was a fight promoted by Michael and Daniel and our hearts weren’t into it so we just circled each other for a while throwing a few ineffectual punches.

Most fights then were mismatched and ineffectual. We weren’t exactly rowdy boys, but we would occasionally cause disturbances. Phillip would get in fights with the older Theisen brother, who ran to his parents until his father finally came knocking at our door to complain to mother. But when he saw Phillip, a scrawny little kid who was two years younger and a foot and a half shorter, he grabbed his son and dragged him home, furious. The Theisens did get to be friends with my parents and we got along reasonably well with their children. They had four boys, the oldest whose name escapes me, Patrick who was Phillip’s age, and the twins who were a little older than Tom. The mother, Betty Theisen, would visit our mother regularly and we didn’t quite know what to make of her. She was flashier than our mother; she wore more jewelry, more make-up, and louder clothes. Leopard skin was one of her favorite patterns. She spoke in a broad accent that we thought was affected so, when she visited, we would take to sitting on the stairs and singing in an exaggerated imitation of her, “Toe-mah-toes, Poh-tah-toes, and Ahn-deeve salad…” This would mortify mother more than it seemed to bother Mrs. Theisen, who either didn’t hear or chose to ignore us. There was no doubt that we were, in many ways, snotty-nosed little brats.

1956-01: Swampscott - The Willey House

When we arrived in Swampscott we stayed at the Willey House, a hotel on Humphrey Street directly across from King’s Beach. Our house was being remodeled, so we lived in the hotel for six weeks. The Willey House was an old fashioned hotel with a nightclub on the first floor and corridors of closed doors on the upper floors. It was a part of an adult world that I only had glimpses of on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the General Electric Theater. Actually, the Willey house was a large house with three floors and it was probably as much a rooming house as a hotel. It had a bar and a bandstand and a limited kitchen on the first floor. At nights we could hear the band playing directly below our floor. Some nights we heard the amplified voice of a female singer, whom we never met. Daniel and I would clown and pretend to swoon at the little we could hear of her voice.

We did meet the band’s drummer and he gave us lessons on playing the drums. He taught us to do a drum roll, a lesson I never quite mastered. I learned to hold the drumsticks, left hand with the back up and the right hand with the palm up (or was it the reverse?), and I could follow his instructions slowly, letting the tip bounce on a stool top, but I lost rhythm picking up speed and I couldn’t achieve a continuous roll. My brothers learned, but my attention would always break and the rhythm would falter.

The only person I can actually remember that worked at the Willey House was Louie the bartender. Most evenings, we would find our parents sitting in the bar talking with Louie. The bar itself was a large oval, trimmed in dark wood and with a pyramid of glass shelves lined with exotic bottles in the middle. The works of the bar - the sinks, the coolers, and mixing counters - were beneath the bar. We could order any soft drink we wanted, and I learned to like Squirt, which was my favorite for a number of years. Louie’s Cherry Special was a favorite. Louie said he designed it for Tommy, who was two years old, but we suspected he had made them before. It was 7-Up with cherry syrup and a maraschino cherry and a splash of Squirt.

All of us, except for Michael and Daniel, stayed in the front room on the second floor. We had a small kitchenette, which served for after-school snacks and emergency hungers, but for regular meals, we walked down to a restaurant called the Hawthorne by the Sea. To my inexperienced eye it seemed to be much like a Howard Johnson’s. They had spaghetti, which was nearly the only thing I ordered. Michael and Daniel’s room was at the back of the hotel, and it was reached by going down the hall and around two corners. Daniel would spend the evening with the rest of the family in our room, even after putting on pajamas, and then he would wander back to his room as he we grew tired. One night Daniel disappeared and mother frantically sent Michael and Dad out searching for him. They found him sound asleep on top of a bed in a strange room. Apparently he wandered through the first open door he came to. This became one of the stories added to the family lore. My story from then was that I woke up to go the bathroom, missed it, and peed into the laundry bag instead. I was always fascinated with family stories and how their retelling could make them more interesting.

Another favorite story was when Mother knocked on Michael and Daniel’s room when they had been experimenting with smoking a cigar. They managed to put the cigar out in the bathroom before opening the door, but Mom kept asking whether Louie had just been there. The air was thick with cigar smoke and Daniel was looking slightly green – an expression that had me watching people’s complexion for years. The question we always asked was whether Mother knew what they were doing and kept asking about Louie as a method of teasing them. Mother would often feign ignorance when it what obvious that she wasn’t ignorant at all.

Louie wasn’t the only cigar smoker in the Willey House, a number of them would gather for a weekly poker game in the third floor lounge. The lounge had overstuffed leather couches and chairs and, on mornings after a poker game, it was filled with stale smoke, overflowing ashtrays, and empty highball glasses. But the crevices of the couch and chairs were also filled with lost change. We would come away with quarters, nickels, dimes, and sometimes ever half-dollars. Usually enough for a trip to the candy store next to Eaton’s Drugs, where they sold penny candy. We could buy paper candy by the foot, or miniature paraffin soft-drink bottles filled with colored syrup, or tootsie-rolls, and candy cigarettes. The store was old fashioned then, something out of my parent’s childhood.

One evening as walked from the Willey House to the restaurant, Michael stopped suddenly and picked up a five-dollar bill from the sidewalk. Five dollars was an incredible amount of money, and finding that much money was staggering. Daniel and I were walking directly behind him and never saw it. Michael always seemed to be lucky that way, if it was luck. Daniel’s contention was that Michael found it because he was trained from his nature studies to always keep his eye on the ground for small animals and reptiles. It was true that Michael would always find salamanders or insects when we never could, I assumed that was because he knew where to look, or maybe because he was older. But there are no standard places to find five-dollar bills, I watched the ground for years after that and never found one. I think he used the money to buy a model boat with a battery-driven outboard motor, a maroon Johnson outboard motor that I always envied. A year or so later I bought a boat with a smaller blue Evinrude outboard motor, which I liked, but you can never quite match what older brothers have.

Entering the restaurant, there was a lunch counter on the left. It was there where Michael sat one morning eating steak and eggs when Mother came in with us. Mother was outraged. Ford Motor Company was paying for our tab as an expense of moving Dad to Massachusetts, and Mother thought Michael was taking advantage of the situation. It embarrassed her, and our Mother was so uncomfortable with embarrassment that embarrassing her was something I never wanted to do. I’m still uncomfortable remembering the day Dad brought home a new Edsel convertible and took us all for a test ride. The car hadn’t been released yet, and people naturally looked at it as we drove by, and I, on an impulse, yelled, “Ten cents a look!” Mother was mortified, and turned and told me to be quiet, and I felt terrible.

It sounded exciting to eat at a restaurant everyday, but it soon became tiresome. No menu is large enough to provide much variety, particularly after you have eliminated whole classes of meals like I did. I didn’t like seafood and, for a restaurant by the sea, that took a lot of entrees out of consideration. Usually it meant spaghetti, hamburgers, and sandwiches. Once, on some special occasion, we had baked Alaska and I learned about the insulating properties of meringue. It was the fanciest desert I ever had but it was rather underwhelming, the meringue was better on Grandma Erlewine's lemon meringue pies and the ice-cream was Neapolitan which always had the worst flavors. Mainly I missed home cooking. I remember the first time we had it, when we were in the kitchen-in-progress and Mom pulled out an electric frying pan and made us grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We all raved about how they were so good. 

During our time in the Willey House, we would hang out at the house as often as possible while workmen were everywhere finishing this or that. Sometimes we had take-out food there. Once I walked down to Doane's by the Sea in the middle of snowstorm to get food for all of us. I bought hot dogs in buns that were sliced on the top so they could be browned on the sides, not sliced on the side like we had back in Michigan. I got fried clams and french fries that I smelled through the paper bag as I walked back up the hill on Reddington with huge snow flakes blowing all around me. I was replaying the song, See You Later Alligator that I heard for the first time on the radio before I left.